Milton achieves the ecological thought in form as well as in content. The versification opens wide, freed from what he called “the modern bondage of rhyming.”7 The very air that Raphael describes is “transpicuous” (8.141). Earth’s atmosphere is pellucid and transparent, allowing the passage of light and hence knowledge. Earth and the distant stars and planets send light to each other (156–158). This dynamic reciprocity of light is like a republic, even a democracy. Scanning the words on the page, the reader must perform this herself. Our eyes have to “return” as we venture out into the space on the right of the page, then voyage back to the next line. We’re placed in the position of one of the far-off worlds, gazing back at Earth. We have been teleported. We see ourselves from the point of view of outer space. Milton loves this point of view. He uses it elsewhere in Paradise Lost to make Satan look really small—we see him as if through the wrong end of a telescope (3.590). Satan stands for the puffed-up ego that wants to be seen as really big. The title of this chapter, “Thinking Big,” is supposed to make us feel humble, not proud.
Like Milton, we live in an age of astronomy. “Earthrise,” the image of Earth from space taken by the Apollo 11 mission, is now an icon. Milton would have liked it. He would probably not have considered it an icon but as iconoclastic. He would have enjoyed how it displaces our sense of centrality, making us see ourselves from the outside. Percy Shelley used the image in his radical poem Queen Mab. The fairy Mab takes a little girl up into outer space to see Earth from a distance and to contemplate the miseries of human history:Earth’s distant orb appeared
The smallest light that twinkles in the heaven;
Whilst round the chariot’s way
Innumerable systems rolled
And countless spheres diffused
An ever-varying glory.
(1.250–255)8
Distance doesn’t mean indifference, and coolness (using reason) isn’t coldness. Environmental language frequently urges us to get hot under the collar. The ecological thought aims for something cooler, at least at first. Al Gore and others have used “Earthrise” to induce us to hold and care for Earth, as if it were a fragile ball of glass. Universe, a magnificent animated film from Canada (1960), and the opening sequence of the film Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s novel, travel out, and out, and out, from Earth into the Universe.9 They are zooms from nowhere. Archimedes said, “Give me somewhere to stand, and I shall move the Earth.” The ecological thought says, “Give us nowhere to stand, and we shall care for the Earth.”
We no longer live within a horizon (did we ever?). We no longer live in a place where the sun comes up and goes down, no matter how much some philosophers insist that we experience things that way. We’ve lost a sense of the significance of events that appear on horizons (did we ever have them?). Strange configurations of stars or lights and clouds in the sky, like some cosmic being’s writing, have disappeared. (An old joke: “Red sky at night, shepherd’s house on fire; red sky in the morning—shepherd’s house still on fire.”) Space isn’t something that happens beyond the ionosphere. We are in space right now.
We can appreciate the fragility of our world from the point of view of space. Thinking big doesn’t prevent us from caring for the environment.10
Google Earth and Google Maps make this vision a matter of pointing and clicking. Some object that these technologies are mass surveillance. They would be right. Only in an age of this “power-knowledge” can global awareness become available for Western rationalists. Google Earth enabled us to see that cows align north to south across the planet.11 This knowledge was unavailable to people supposedly “embedded” in a “lifeworld.” Consider how we’re now aware of risks on global and micro scales. We can find out exactly how much mercury our bodies contain. We know that popular kinds of plastic leach dioxins. The more risk we know about, the more risk spreads. Risk becomes democratized, and democracy becomes about managing risk. Ulrich Beck calls it a “risk society”: how our increasing awareness of risk in all dimensions (across space, within our bodies, over time) changes our awareness of how we coexist.12 We can’t “unthink” risk. Along with the sense of tremendous power and voyeuristic, sadistic fantasies of being able to see everything (on Google Earth, YouTube, and so on) goes a sense of perilous vulnerability.
TIBETANS IN SPACE
Do we have to go into outer space to care for Earth? Do we need high technology? Do we need Google Earth to imagine Earth? Is Western science and power the only path to ecological awareness? Many environmentalists would throw up their hands at my assumptions here. First of all, isn’t Western society and all it stands for (the dreaded Cartesian dualism, “technology” and its by-products) precisely what we must destroy or retreat from? And don’t so-called prehistoric, pretechnological societies hold keys to our salvation?
No. Consider a society that has developed the ecological thought outside the scope of Western culture: Tibet. Old Tibet hardly even had wheels, except prayer wheels. Yet Tibetans had ideas of big space and big time when in the West these would have been heresy.
There is a lot to say about modern Tibet, perhaps too much—an endless succession of checkpoints; prisoners digging roads with their bare hands; the way Tibetans are treated like Native Americans were during the pioneering days; New Age appropriations of their culture, as if the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries were happening simultaneously. I will avoid that and head straight for an insight. It’s the “West” that fixates on place, thinking that there’s this thing called “place” that is solid and real and independent and that has been progressively undermined by modernity, capitalism, technology, you name it. Fixation on place impedes a truly ecological view.
Before I went to Tibet, I wondered whether indigenous people actually did have an “authentic,” “non-Western” experience of place. I returned less sure than ever. When you camp in Tibet, as I did for about two weeks, you sleep under outer space—as directly below it as you can get without flying. The Tibetan plateau is about 16,500 feet above sea level on average: you can pretty much walk to the second base camp of Everest from the town of Tingri (a twenty-one-mile hike across a flat plain). Look up at a plane: at four times higher than that, you’re not even close.
The surface of the Tibetan plateau is already like the surface of Mars. Above me, the Milky Way never looked so big. Imagine a really wide carpet runner. Now multiply that by about three. Fill it with thousands of points of dustlike stars. Add about thirty new stars to the Big Dipper. Imagine shooting stars so frequent you don’t have to look for more than half an hour to see about ten. Some of them make a sound as they burn up in the atmosphere. One shooting star was about the diameter of half a one-cent coin and fizzed as it swept across the sky like ice cream in Coca-Cola.
Tibetans live very close to outer space, so it’s not surprising that they include it in their culture. When asked where he came from, the first Bön king (Bön is the indigenous culture) pointed up to the sky. No, I’m not saying that Tibetans came from outer space. The tantric teachings say there are 6,400,000 Tantras of Dzogchen (texts of a form of Tibetan Buddhism). On Earth we have seventeen. Up there, in the highly visible night sky, perhaps in other universes, there exist the remaining 6,399,983. Up there, someone is meditating.
Tibetans would make the best space pilots, especially for long space missions. They would need to learn only how to operate the equipment. Tibetan culture and religion is all about space. All kinds of images entice us to think big. One image of enlightened mind is that it’s like space. One Buddhist system says that our Universe, along with one billion universes like it, floats within a single pollen grain inside an anther on a lotus flower growing out of a begging bowl in the hands of a Buddha called Immense Ocean Vairochana.13 Tibetans would arrive at the edge of the Solar System and declare, “Wow, what a great opportunity to learn more about emptiness.” Outer space wouldn’t undermine their “beliefs.”
Does this sound like primitivism? Primitivists maintain there was a time�
�call it a golden age, call it “prehistory”—when human beings didn’t do all the bad things they do today, when they had better social systems, enjoyed more pleasures, and so on. Some primitivists believe that holdout societies persist somewhere on Earth. I would have accused anyone talking like this of just such a fantasy before I went to Tibet. Tibetans have a great appreciation for inner space. So they would thrive in outer space. Tibetans do not belong in the past or in a museum. They belong in the future.
Thinking big doesn’t contradict concern for minute particulars. Christian apocalypticism shares with deep ecology a fundamental lack of concern for the way things are going. Since the end of the world is nigh, or since we will all become extinct in the long run, there isn’t much point in caring. Their view of outer space doesn’t prevent the Tibetans from having developed ideas about compassion and nonviolence and a remarkable system of restorative justice.14
In the West, we think of ecology as earthbound. Not only earthbound: we want ecology to be about location, location, location. In particular, location must be local: it must feel like home; we must recognize it and think it in terms of the here and now, not the there and then. For the philosopher Martin Heidegger, thinking itself was an environmental presence, as the word “dwelling” suggests. When we dwell on something, we inhabit it. Originally, for Heidegger, thinking dwelt upon the Earth.15 It is ironic that Heidegger thought he was thinking like a peasant. No self-respecting Tibetan peasant would think like that. She would be much more likely to say, like the rock band Spiritualized, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space.”16 The localism meme will compel westerners to eat each other as soon as they get beyond the Asteroid Belt.
Heidegger’s environmentalism is a sad, fascist, stunted bonsai version, forced to grow in a tiny iron flowerpot by a cottage in the German Black Forest. We can do better. Rather than cowering or running away, we can beat Heidegger at his own game. You want religious language? Look up at the Milky Way. Imagine n-thousand habitable worlds, filled with sentient beings wondering just how vast the ecological thought is. Could we have a progressive ecology that was big, not small; spacious, not place-ist; global, not local (if not universal); not embodied but displaced, spaced, outer spaced? Our slogan should be dislocation, dislocation, dislocation.
THE MESH: A TRULY WONDERFUL FACT
We can no longer have that reassuringly trivial conversation about the weather with someone in the street, as a way to break the ice or pass the time. The conversation either trails off into a disturbingly meaningful silence, or someone mentions global warming. The weather no longer exists as a neutral-seeming background against which events take place. When weather becomes climate—when it enters the realms of science and history—it can no longer be a stage set. You can’t visualize the climate. Mapping it requires a processing speed in terabytes per second (a terabyte is a thousand gigabytes).17
The weather withers because of our increasing awareness of the mesh. Most words I considered to describe interdependence were compromised by references to the Internet—like “network.” Either that, or they were compromised by vitalism, the belief in a living substance. “Web” is a little bit too vitalist and a little bit Internet-ish for my taste, so it loses on both counts. “Mesh” is short, shorter in particular than “the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things.”
“Mesh” can mean the holes in a network and threading between them. It suggests both hardness and delicacy. It has uses in biology, mathematics, and engineering and in weaving and computing—think stockings and graphic design, metals and fabrics. It has antecedents in mask and mass, suggesting both density and deception.18 By extension, “mesh” can mean “a complex situation or series of events in which a person is entangled; a concatenation of constraining or restricting forces or circumstances; a snare.”19 In other words, it’s perfect.
The ecological thought stirs because the mesh appears in our social, psychic, and scientific domains. Since everything is interconnected, there is no definite background and therefore no definite foreground. Darwin sensed the mesh while pondering the implications of natural selection. You can detect Darwin’s amazement: It is a truly wonderful fact—the wonder of which we are apt to overlook through familiarity—that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group ... varieties of the same species most closely related together, species of the same genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sections and sub-genera, species of distinct genera much less closely related, and genera related in different degrees, forming sub-families, families, orders, sub-classes, and classes. The several subordinate groups in any class cannot be ranked in a single file, but seem rather to be clustered round points, and these round in other points, and so on in almost endless cycles.20
Every single life form is literally familiar: we’re genetically descended from them. Darwin imagines an endlessly branching tree. In contrast, mesh doesn’t suggest a clear starting point, and those “clusters” of “subordinate groups” are far from linear (they “cannot be ranked in a single file”). Each point of the mesh is both the center and edge of a system of points, so there is no absolute center or edge. Still, the tree image provides a marvelous way of ending the chapter on natural selection: “the Great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the Earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.”21 A “ramification” is a branch and an implication, a branching thought. Darwin brings ecological interconnectedness and thinking together.
The ecological thought does, indeed, consist in the ramifications of the “truly wonderful fact” of the mesh. All life forms are the mesh, and so are all dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. We know even more now about how life forms have shaped Earth (think of oil, of oxygen—the first climate change cataclysm). We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria. Death and the mesh go together in another sense, too, because natural selection implies extinction.22
Beings such as bees and flowers evolve together; all living beings evolve according to their environments.23 But it would be wrong to claim that species look like they do because they are somehow “fitted” for their ecological niche. Darwin dispenses with the assumption that vultures are bald because they like sticking their heads into filth or that vines have hooks on them because they are useful for sticking on trees. Yes, those bald heads are handy for sticking into filth. But that isn’t why they evolved.24 The mesh must be made of very interesting material indeed. It isn’t “organic,” in the sense of form fitting function. William Wordsworth wanted to show how the organic world was “fitted” to the mind, and vice versa.25 The theory of evolution, the basis of the ecological thought, does use words such as “fittest” and “adaptation,” but it doesn’t imply that bald heads exist because of piles of filth. Darwin would have concurred with the poet William Blake, who wrote in the margins of his copy of Wordsworth at those precise lines about fitting, “You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted ... & please your lordship.”26 Natural selection isn’t about decorum or an organic “fit.” Coots don’t have webbed feet, but they seem to do just fine in the water.27 It was Alfred Russel Wallace who nervously persuaded Darwin to insert Herbert Spencer’s invidious phrase “survival of the fittest” into The Origin of Species.28 Wallace was concerned about the apparent pointlessness of life forms. For the ecological thought, this is their saving grace.
The mesh consists of infinite connections and infinitesimal differences. Few would argue that a single evolutionary change isn’t minute.29 Scale is infinite in both directions: infinite in size and infinite in detail. And each being in the mesh interacts with others. The mesh isn’t static.30 We can’t rigidly specify anything as irrelevant. If there is no background and therefore no fore
ground, then where are we? We orient ourselves according to backgrounds against which we stand out. There is a word for a state without a foreground–background distinction: madness.
The ecological crisis makes us aware of how interdependent everything is. This has resulted in a creepy sensation that there is literally no world anymore. We have gained Google Earth but lost the world. “World” means a location, a background against which our actions become significant. But in a situation in which everything is potentially significant, we’re lost. It’s the same situation the schizophrenic finds herself in. She is unable to distinguish between information (foreground) and noise (background).31 So she hears voices coming from the radiator, yet hears speech as meaningless burbling. Everything seems threateningly meaningful, but she can’t pin down what the meaning is.
The more we become aware of the dangers of ecological instability—extinctions, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, starvation—the more we find ourselves lacking a reference point. When we think big we discover a hole in our psychological universe. There is no way of measuring anything anymore, since there is nowhere “outside” this universe from which to take an impartial measurement. Strangely, thinking big doesn’t mean that we put everything in a big box. Thinking big means that the box melts into nothing in our hands.
The Ecological Thought Page 4